Beyond Binary

Updated 4:05 p.m., with comment from Yahoo.

A Department of Justice probe into hiring practices among high-tech firms appears to have stretched out to include some of the best-known names in the industry.

The Washington Post first reported the story on Tuesday evening, listing Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Genentech as among the companies that were being looked at. Microsoft and Intel are also believed to have received requests for information, according to sources as well as to a New York Times report.

to The issue is believed to center on whether certain companies agreed not to hire from one another.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Intel all declined comment. Late on Wednesday, Yahoo confirmed it had received an inquiry from the government "a while ago."

"We have been contacted (by the DOJ), and we are cooperating," A Yahoo representative said.

Word of the probe took some in the tech industry by surprise, given several prominent cases of tech firms suing one another over worker poaching. Two of the companies said to be involved in the probe--Microsoft and Google--waged a fierce, multistate court battle after Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee was hired by Google. (The two sides eventually settled.)

More recently, Apple and IBM duked it out after Apple hired IBM executive Mark Papermaster. He eventually took up work at Apple, but only after a lawsuit and eventual settlement. IBM also sued over a recent Dell hire, David Johnson.

CNET News' Tom Krazit contributed to this report.

With billions in stimulus dollars available to help doctors and hospitals digitize their health records, it stands to reason that tech companies want to make spending that money as easy as possible.

Several of the players--Allscripts, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Nuance Communications--have teamed up in an alliance aimed at educating doctors on the many tools available to help set up electronic health records.

The EHR Stimulus Alliance is pulling out all the stops, with a road tour, Webcasts, telephone hotline, and other tools all aimed at demystifying the technology and showing case studies of where it has worked.

President Obama's stimulus package provides on the order of $20 billion for health care technology, with the central focus being nudging hospitals and doctors to move their records from manila folders to computers. Even with the money, though, it's seen as a daunting task.

"The EHR Stimulus Alliance is a unified movement toward turning the national dialogue surrounding the EHR transition into action," Nuance Healthcare President John Shagoury said in a statement. "Each of the partners involved has unique solutions that are crucial to EHR implementation. In our case, because most doctors speak at least three times faster than they type, speech recognition technology helps increase the meaningful use and efficiency of EHRs by decreasing physician reliance on the keyboard and mouse."

The alliance hopes to reach half a million doctors with its message.

Although the alliance represents a number of the big names in tech, there are a lot of other players in the electronic health records business, including Cerner, General Electric, eClinicalWorks, McKesson, and NextGen, as well as start-ups such as Medsphere. Other tech players also pushing hard for their piece of the industry include IBM and storage giant EMC.

By the way, I and some colleagues will have a ton more to say on this topic next week as CNET News takes an in-depth look at the push toward electronic health records.

Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco plan to announce Tuesday that they are working together to help ensure that proper standards are created for measuring digital literacy.

The three companies aren't coming up with the assessment criteria themselves, but rather bringing together a group of education leaders and academics to identify the characteristics that should form the basis of global standards.

While such standards have emerged for math and science, they are also needed for other kinds of 21st century skills, Microsoft Vice President Anoop Gupta said in an interview last week.

To head the effort, the troika has tapped professor Barry McGaw, currently the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, to serve as the project's executive director.

Gupta, who heads Microsoft's emerging markets effort, said that although leading companies are often advocating for similar education reforms, their work is often done solo.

"Today we often speak in different voices," Gupta said in an interview last week. "That confuses the decision makers."

Microsoft itself has been pouring millions into its emerging markets programs, including its Partners in Learning effort. Gupta said education remains a focus for Microsoft, but declined to say whether any cuts in his budget were looming amid the troubled economy.

"Certainly for us, like any company,...we are evaluating," he said. "We are being wise in how we manage the spend."

Overall, he said, there should be more dollars heading to education, particularly in the United States, where incoming president Barack Obama has outlined plans for major spending on infrastructure, including schools.

"Then, in fact, when we emerge out of this, suddenly the schools are truly wired for broadband," Gupta said.

You know an e-mail is going to be juicy when its subject line is "CONFIDENTIAL" and it starts out: "I would prefer not to have this discussion on email."

That's how Intel's Renee James started an e-mail to Microsoft's Will Poole, discussing the company's concerns over Microsoft's "Vista Capable" program. Intel was particularly upset over Microsoft's plan to require Vista Capable machines to have graphics cards that would support Vista's new driver model, as its 915 chipset was not planned to have that support.

Microsoft eventually did drop that requirement, a shift that is now the subject of a class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs in that case charge that, by caving to Intel, Microsoft allowed sub-optimal Vista machines to be sold with the Vista Capable sticker.

The exchange between James and Poole is just one of many new e-mails detailed in the latest court filings, which were noted Thursday by Seattle-area tech site TechFlash.

TechFlash has the full court filing up on its Web site, so if it's a slow Friday, by all means give the article and the documents a read. If you don't have time, here are some of the juiciest bits:

• Intel CEO Paul Otellini called Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer personally to air his complaints about the program, which initially didn't call for machines running Intel's 915 chipset to qualify for the Vista Capable sticker.

• While Sony was pleased Microsoft decided to allow the 915-based systems to qualify even though they lacked a Vista graphics driver, Dell was confused, given that such systems wouldn't qualify for a Vista logo once Vista started shipping. HP meanwhile, was peeved, because it had invested in pricier graphics chips to support Vista's WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) graphics requirement.

• Jim Allchin was described variously as "beyond being upset" and "apoplectic" over the decision, while other Microsoft workers described it as bad for customers.

In an e-mail--one that I'm sure is a favorite of the plaintiffs' lawyers--Allchin says "I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program."

Computer makers "will say a machine is Capable and customers will believe that it will run all the core Vista features," Allchin wrote. "The fact that aero (Vista's new graphics theme) won't be there EVER for many of these machines is misleading to customers."

With Microsoft having, at the very least a "hiring chill," we decided to check in with other big tech giants on their hiring plans.

It's a little hard to get a clear picture of what other companies are doing--in part because so many have already announced plans to cut jobs. Intel's workforce is down thousands from where it was a couple years ago. Hewlett-Packard has already said it plans to shave 24,000 jobs as part of its EDS purchase, while Dell and others have also been cutting back.

Yahoo, already under pressure from competitor Google and the ugly saga of Microsoft's attempt to acquire the company, said Friday that it is bracing itself for a weaker advertising market.

"We believe it's imperative we align our cost structure with today's economic realities," said Yahoo spokesman Brad Williams. "We've been looking at ways to streamline our processes and bring more efficiencies to how we work as an organization," he said, and the company hired Bain & Co. to "help us identify opportunities for improvement."

He wouldn't confirm that layoffs are part of the plan, but payroll is a major expense, and most employees know how to read the tea leaves when they hear the word "streamline."

Though Yahoo is under pressure itself, Williams said the economy and the advertising market led to the current analysis. "The collapse of the credit markets...accelerated what had been a pretty uncertain market," he said.

For its part, Google said "We continue to hire talented people across functions for our offices worldwide." Of course, the real question is at what pace they continue that hiring.

In a meeting with reporters Wednesday, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt supplied a big dose of caution about whether there might be effects from the broader economic issues.

"It's a very dynamic situation. There is evidence credit is a problem for certain sectors. We have not yet seen any impact from it," Schmidt said. But, he added, "We might. All bets are off. Nobody knows."

Many expect TV and print advertising to be hit harder, but that doesn't mean online ads are immune. Even if individual ads or campaigns are profitable, the ad market can be hurt when customers tighten their purse strings and advertisers reduce spending.

Most other companies didn't have much new to say on a Friday afternoon, but it's fair to say that every company has got to be taking a second look at those 2009 numbers. Anyway, here's what several big names did have to say on the matter.

Dell: Dell spokesman David Frink said the company is certainly monitoring things, but had nothing new to announce. "But as you know, we've got a well publicized effort under way to reduce costs," Frink said. Dell has cut 8,500 workers from its ranks in the last four quarters. That said, Frink said Dell "will selectively hire in areas that are important."

HP: "Workforce rebalancing is a continual activity across our businesses and geographies to ensure that resources are aligned with the opportunities in the market," HP said in a statement. "We expect that our overhead costs, which include IT, real estate and shared support functions, will decline more from (fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2009) than they did from (fiscal 2005 to fiscal 2006)."

IBM: "We haven't announced any freeze," an IBM representative said. As of right now, nothing has changed at IBM. We continue to hire in key skills areas."

McAfee: "McAfee has not changed its hiring process and continues to make strategic investments in its personnel," A company representative told CNET News. "We continue to add to our headcount. McAfee has grown significantly over the past quarters."

Microsoft: "Microsoft will continue to grow and add thousands of new jobs this year, but given the current economic environment, we are taking the prudent step of reviewing our hiring plans and will make some adjustments as appropriate," spokesman Lou Gellos said in a statement. "We are optimistic about our prospects for growth and will continue hiring the talent we need to ensure our ongoing success."

Intel: Declined to comment, citing a pre-earnings announcement quiet period.

Apple: Declined to comment, also citing a pre-earnings quiet period.

Oracle: Declined to comment.

CNET News' Charles Cooper, Stephen Shankland, and Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

There is a ton of interesting information in the documents that have been released as part of the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit.

There's the juicy e-mails that show Microsoft caving to pressure from Intel and lowering the graphics requirements to get the Vista Capable sticker. There's also Dell outlining all of the problems it had with Microsoft in getting Vista to market as well as with its many readiness programs.

For those that want to give the full documents a read, the Seattle Post-Intellingencer has posted the complete PDF files of the documents, linked to from this blog by Todd Bishop.

Another area that got some notice this week was the inordinate number of early Vista crashes that were attributed to Nvidia, according to a list from early 2007. Nvidia was cited as causing nearly 30 percent of early Vista crashes (the exact time of the report is not listed), while Microsoft itself was to blame for nearly 18 percent. Intel and ATI each accounted for about 9 percent of crashes, according to the documents.

"These issues are a year and a half old," Nvidia PR director Derek Perez said on Friday. Perez noted the company took a number of steps in response to the issues, including establishing a Web site where people could report such issues and said the company made significant progress in reducing those errors. "We continue to improve drivers," he said.

In a statement, Microsoft also pointed to the complexities inherent in creating new graphics drivers.

"Microsoft takes exhaustive steps in testing hardware compatibility internally, as well as by working directly with our partners, to address compatibility long before customers experience an issue," the software maker said. "However, testing can only be conducted under so many different circumstances, particularly with such an exceptionally complex code that graphic drivers have. Understanding this, Microsoft has set up a system to help quickly identify the problems, work to fix them and, if warranted, potentially push them through to customers via Windows Update. NVIDIA has taken similar steps, and since launching Windows Vista, Microsoft has seen great progress in addressing potential issues by NVIDIA."

One of the questions I have is which is worse--having buggy drivers, as Nvidia clearly did--or pushing Microsoft to lower its graphics requirements to include less-than-optimal graphics, as Intel appears to have done. Nvidia can and has improved its drivers, but there were a whole lot of systems pushed out in 2006 with the Intel graphics chip that did not initially qualify for the Vista capable logo.

There's nothing like a big challenge to bring a couple closer together.

Such is the case with Intel and Microsoft, which announced on Tuesday they are jointly backing university research to help address the challenges posed by a shift to processors with many brains.

The companies are committing a combined $20 million to fund parallel computing research centers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For years, the PC processor just got faster and faster, performance gains that software could easily take advantage of. In recent years, though, chip speed gains have flattened out, while Intel and others have been pushing multiple processing cores on a single chip.

More cores can also add up to better performance, but to fully utilize multiple brains, software needs to be rewritten in ways that allow tasks to be split up and handled in parallel, a significant technical hurdle.

"The software has to also start following Moore's Law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said at a May gathering with reporters.

Both Intel and Microsoft have been working on this issue for some time.

In January, Microsoft announced it was setting up a joint research facility in Spain in conjunction with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told CNET News.com in May that the shift of the PC from a single processor to one with many processing engines is "probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years."

Tony Hey, Microsoft's vice president of external research, echoed that on a conference call Tuesday, saying the shift in chip architecture will "profoundly impact" the way software is written.

"We're really in the midst of a revolution in the software industry," he said.